Hi. I am using World Machine, but I haven’t found yet any option/tool inside the WM program, that would allow to create such detailled textures. Maybe someone knows ?
Final Texture itself is not result of world machine.
It is different layers of tiled textures blend together in Material using different masks(It could be anything: altitude, slope, layer mask from World Machine, hand painting via vertex color, etc)
Any more tips how to do it ? Let’s say that I have 4 textures prepared - rock, gravel, grass01, grass02 and another one, that is an output bitmap from worldmachine. What now ?
The tutorial posted is good for showing off the WM end, but I would recommend going a different route in terms of the terrain shader. In the example provided, the terrain is textured using the basic setup (importing all your single textures/normals into one material and using a landscape layer node to blend them all together) and this issue that this method has is that you lack the ability to control individual material attributes (spec/gloss/roughness etc). Once you get comfortable making your splat maps/landscapes in World Machine and can easily import all of them, I would recommend looking up material functions (these allow you to create a material like you normally would but the cool part is that you can use them inside of another material) and then using a material layer blend function node to blend your material functions together. This method allows you to utilize splatmaps AND paint by hand, so it’s really the best bet for someone starting off.
Setup another layer blend that you feed into spec/roughness/etc- right? Or maybe I don’t understand what setup you are talking about. Because I copy my Layer Blend node with all the names for the normals/spec/roughness/diffuse.
Also- that terrain looks great and all but I am skeptical of what it looks like from the ground perspective. It’s very easy to create this terrain in Worldmachine, export and get it setup like the above shot. At this point it would probably take me an hour or less. If you are making a flight simulator or need a facade for a level- hey, it’s awesome. If you need to actually run around the terrain, I’ve found you need a much more complicated approach to get nice fidelity, something that looks good close up and far away.
Another example of this is the UE4 hang glider demo- try running around on the ground in that one. The whole thing falls apart fast.
That’s not what I meant by that. Take my force field shader mat tree for example: This is highly customized and utilizes multiple material attributes just like you would do if you were making individual materials for terrain. My point is that I have yet to see anyone utilize that method (shown in the video) that contained real control over every aspect of each material due to blending all of them together. Say you wanted to have dynamic weather and it rained at some point; you would likely try to control the gloss of the materials via the shader paramters but it would affect every material equally due to the blending. This is why I dislike that particular method. I know I’m probably still not being clear enough and if I’m wrong about that method, please let me know. I just think that it’s good for some rapid prototyping but that’s about it. If you utilize material functions/mat blending, you can go into each material function and set up distance blending as you see fit for each material like you mentioned (needing the landscape to look good up close and far away). Also, you can hand paint alongside using splat maps if you need to do that. I’m about to do a video about this topic because I see so many new comers directed to that standard method and I’m really not sure why.
Ah yes I didn’t watch the video before, I know what you mean.
I’m using a sort of hybrid method of importing my maps as layer info, separate layers for painting and world aligned blends. I do have control over properties based on surface, the big problem is creative use of maps because you quickly run out.